“WHAT CAN BE the weapons of the people to protect themselves and the body politic either against false servants of the people and the spurious shock-minorities or against the corruption of true servants of the people and genuine prophetic shock-minorities shifting from the struggle for freedom to the struggle for domination? Nothing can replace in this connection the strength of the common ethos, the inner energy of democratic faith and civil morality in the people themselves, the enjoyment by them of real freedom in their everyday life and of a truly human standard of living, and the active participation of them in political life from the bottom up. If these conditions are lacking, the door is open to deception.
“Yet there is in any case a weapon which they should particularly treasure as a bulwark of their political liberties. Namely the freedom of expression and criticism. That’s a new reason to confirm what has been said in this chapter about the freedom of the press and of the means of expression of thought, even at the price of great risks,—still less great than the loss of liberty. A free people needs a free press, I mean free from the State, and free from economic bondage and the power of money.
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“I have said that democracy cannot do without the prophetic element; that it is a sad necessity; or, rather, that in a democracy which has come of age, in a society of free men, expert in the virtues of freedom and just in its fundamental structures, the prophetic function would be integrated in the normal and regular life of the body politic, and issue from the people themselves. In such a society inspiration would rise from the free common activity of the people in their most elementary, most humble communities. By choosing their leaders, at this most elementary , through a natural and experiential process, as fellow-men personally known to them and deserving their trust in the minor affairs of the community, the people would grow more and more conscious of political realities and more ready to choose their leaders, at the level of the common good of the body politic, with true political awareness, as genuine deputies for them.”
~Jacques Maritain: Excerpt from Man and the State, Chap. V.—The Democratic Charter.
“THERE is no law without morality. An immoral law is a contradiction in terms or simply a statement of fact, namely, that this positive legal norm conflicts with the moral law and hence can impose no obligation, though the state may have the physical power to enforce it. The will to achieve an ever greater approximation of the positive law to the norms of morality is so deeply rooted in man that even the positive law is always referring to morality. Often enough the judge, as was already the case among the Romans with their doctrine of aequitas, is not content with a mechanical subsuming of particular instances under the general norm but allows equity to play its part. In extreme cases, however, he goes back to the will of the lawmaker, who is assumed to will only what is moral; or, if the literal meaning of the law is impossible, he puts forward an independent interpretation of the meaning of the law, on the ground that the lawgiver could not have willed anything unjust.”
~Heinrich A. Rommen: Natural Law: A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy, p. 188.
From Right And Reason: Ethics Based on the Teachings of Aristotle & St. Thomas Aquinas.
By Fr. Austin Fagothey, S.J.
TAXATION
THE state has from the natural law the right to the means necessary to accomplish its end. One of these means is revenue, and the ordinary way of raising revenue is by taxes. The state therefore has the right to tax its citizens. But this right is not unlimited. The state has the right only to the taxes it needs or forecasts that it will need, and acts against justice by demanding more. Legislators have a strict moral obligation not to impose too heavy a tax burden on the people, and those in charge of public funds are morally accountable for their use.
There is also a moral obligation to distribute the tax load as justly as possible. The only practical method is to make taxes proportionate to the citizen’s ability to pay, since there are many who not only cannot give anything but actually need help from the state. How the taxes ought to be arranged so as to fulfill the end of distributive justice is a matter for political and financial experts, and is beyond the scope of ethics as such.
If the state has the right to impose taxes, the citizen has the duty to pay taxes. In exercising its right the state must observe distributive justice; conversely, the citizen’s duty to pay taxes is one of legal justice. One who is not too poor to pay some taxes yet pays none whatever is plainly failing in an important duty concerning the common good. But there are so many indirect taxes today that no one could avoid paying some taxes. Whether a man could fulfill his whole tax obligation in this way would depend on the amount and kind of his wealth.
Is one morally obliged to pay all the taxes imposed? If the tax is clearly unjust, there can be no moral obligation. The judgment that taxes are unjust must not be made hastily; people are always complaining about taxes even when there is no doubt of their necessity. On the other hand, the complete lack of conscience shown by too many public officials in spending the people’s money makes the conviction all but inevitable that the state has not the right to all the revenue it asks. We must therefore distinguish between the duty of paying this or that particular tax, a duty that is often not at all clear.
Are particular tax laws, then, purely penal laws? Those who reject the term entirely must give a negative answer. But those who admit purely penal laws in some sense, whether they mean only so-called laws that are mere directives or whether they mean real laws, with a disjunctive obligation, consider it a solidly probable opinion that some particular tax laws are purely penal. Taxes have become too numerous and complicated for the ordinary citizen to handle, are accompanied by disproportionate penalties, and are often deducted at the source so that the citizen is not even trusted to do his duty; the state shows that it simply wants its money and makes no appeal to the public conscience. These are the usual indications of a purely penal law. It is therefore difficult to see a moral fault in a man who in general meets his tax obligations and supports the state, but occasionally evades a tax here and there, provided that in doing so he does not resort to such practices as lying or bribery. Conduct of this kind is certainly not recommended and a truly upright man would despise such pettifoggery.
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PROTECTION OF CITIZEN’S FREEDOMS
ONE of the ironies of history is the need for a Bill of Rights. The state, which exists to safeguard its citizens in the free exercise of their natural rights, has been a notorious violator of them. The history of the last few centuries portrays the victory of the people in their long struggle to get back from the state fundamental rights the state had usurped and liberties it had suppressed. Hardly had the victory been achieved when totalitarianism arose as the most ruthless destroyer of freedom yet to appear.
From Chap. 26, "Civil Law," pp. 423-426.
“JUST AS PHILOSOPHERS differ about the origin of society, so too they dispute the foundation of rights and duties. For those who hold that man is rational and free, and therefore social by nature, the foundation of right and duty is the natural law. Our rational insight into the natural law tells us what we ought to do to realize our destiny, and our duties are precisely those things which the natural law prescribes for us as necessary. But as a correlative to this obligation, we have a claim on those goods which we need to carry out our duties. We have a right to them. Duties and rights are, then, something which flow out of the very nature of man. This is the reason why we describe certain rights, such as the freedom of speech and conscience, as inalienable: they are rooted so deeply in human nature that to remove them is to destroy or mutilate the very personality of man.
“Opposed to the doctrine that our rights and duties are linked to human nature itself is the view of those philosophers who. Following Hobbes and Rousseau, root the rights of man in the state itself. In the original social contract by which, according to their opinion, the state is founded, the individual surrenders his basic liberty as the condition for a peaceful life in society. Henceforth, the state itself becomes the fountainhead of rights and duties, specifying them and changing them at will.
“The repercussions of these conflicting doctrines about the nature of rights and d are apparent in the deep cleavages that divide modern society. The modern totalitarian state, in which there is no such thing as an unjust law, is the inheritor and exponent of the doctrines of Hobbes and Rousseau. Justice is what the state says it is, and if the citizen enjoys certain rights within the community, it is by the good leave of the state, which is free to withdraw those liberties again. Similarly the state tells the citizens what its duties are, and it may change them at will, so that what is duty today may be as crime tomorrow.
Finally, the illusions and distortions of the naturalist philosophers who helped prepare the way for the modern tyrannical state must be added to the corrosive effect of moral skepticism. There are few greater enemies to man’s freedom than the moral skeptic, for whom the words “right” and “duty” are empty sounds, since what does not exist or what is illusory is not worth struggling for. In the face of apathy and doubt the ruthless and the strong take over and “right” becomes synonymous with “might.”
~Daniel J. Sullivan: An Introduction to Philosophy: The Perennial Principles of the Classical Realist Tradition
